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Dialog Boxes

Dialog boxes appear when you select certain menu items or when you perform certain actions. They allow you to choose and apply various modifications to your drawing. Visio 5.0 has some dialog boxes that combine similar subjects into one box with tabs to access the individual subjects.

Visio 5.0 incorporates tabbed dialog boxes that provide control over numerous aspects of a drawing element or condition.

Dialog boxes are application modal, meaning that once a dialog box is opened, no other commands or actions can be performed in the program until you address the options posed in the dialog box by pressing either OK or Cancel.

Besides providing modification choices, dialog boxes also give information about certain inherited traits through the use of color-coded text in the boxes. The concept of inheritance is described in other Visimation tutorials (not yet online. Ed.), but for now it is important to understand what the different colors represent.

Black text indicates that a particular attribute has been inherited from another shape or from another style. For example, if you drag a shape with a green fill from a stencil onto a drawing page, the new shape will inherit that fill color, as well as all the other traits of the stencil shape. If you were to open the Fill dialog box for the new shape, the word "Color:" would appear black because that attribute, fill color, was inherited from the stencil shape. Vision uses this inheritance principle because it saves time and space. Having a shape reference another shape takes up less memory than having both shapes with their own separate attributes.

If you encounter green text in a dialog box it means that an attribute has been changed but has not yet been applied. In the previous example, if you had changed the fill color to red in the Fill dialog box but had not exited the dialog box or pressed apply yet, the work "Color:" would change from black to green. This would indicate that the attribute of fill color had been changed but had not yet been applied to the shape.

However, if you had changed the fill color to red and then pressed the Apply or OK buttons you would have over-ridden the existing inherited trait, and applied a local train unique to that shape. In that case, returning to the Fill dialog box would show you blue text for the work "Color:", indicating that the attribute of fill color was a locally over-ridden one. Blue text, therefore, is representative of attributes that have been locally over-ridden.

Two other color indicators that you should be aware of are magenta and red. Magenta text signifies that a selection contains different values for the same attribute, such as a shape that has two different font types. Red text indicates that a selection’s attribute uses a complex formula rather than a simple value, in which case caution should be exercised because altering that attribute could have unexpected results.

The Visio Basics tutorial is based on training material devised, created and delivered by Visimation.

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